Surrender: We’ve lost our privacy in an information swamp

Privacy is dead in this world where every breadcrumb is gathered up and stored by our government and private companies alike in virtual vaults filled with your information — where you've lived and who you've known and your banking information and your Social Security number and most everything else someone would need to claim your identity — and that hackers keep breaking into.

Uber joined the list of corporate mega-leaks last week, when the company finally fessed up to paying hackers $100,000 a year earlier to keep quiet about the personal information they'd snatched about 57 million customers and drivers.

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Add that to the 3 billion compromised Yahoo! email accounts, the 143 million Social Security and driver's license numbers stolen from Equifax, the 40 million debit and credit cards taken from Target, and on and on — including the full user information from 412 million accounts (including 15 million supposedly deleted ones) from AdultFriendFinder.com, the "world's largest sex and swinger community."

Even that pales as blackmail material compared to the hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's Central Personnel Data File, where thieves allegedly tied to the Chinese government got the goods on every federal employee and retiree, including military records, addresses, dates of birth, job and pay history and much more, along with millions of fingerprints that could out secret agents.

Worse, those hackers have the 127-page SF-86 disclosure forms that people fill out in vast detail and under penalty of perjury before getting access to our national secrets, and possibly also polygraph tests in which those applicants are asked to detail their sexual histories and confess to any past law-breaking.

Then-FBI Director James Comey — at the same time that he was trying to force Apple and others to provide "master keys" the feds could use to break their encryption when needed — called the hack "a very big deal from a national security perspective and from a counterintelligence perspective . . . a treasure trove of information about everybody who has worked for, tried to work for, or works for the United States government."

Add all that to the 700,000 files Chelsea Manning gave to WikiLeaks, and the 1.5 million or so files taken from the NSA by Edward Snowden and whatever leaks we don't know about yet and it's clear our secret collectors can't be trusted with those secrets — and that's not to mention the NSA's own hacking tools being hacked into and shared online by apparently Russian-connected hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers.

The rule: What had seemed private or sure to be forgotten is public and prone to be surfaced eventually. And this information speaks volumes — and adds up to more than the evident sum of its parts.

Facebook knows so much about its users, from so many secret sources of information, that, as Kashmir Hill has been reporting at Gizmodo, it's suggested to users as "people you may know" one-night stands, a child to a sperm donor, a psychiatrist's patients to each other, and on and on.

Who knows what the other keepers of our secrets — the ones who aren't trying to sell us on their services — are doing with them in this furiously evolving internet of things that encompasses the Amazon Echo in your house, drones that fly in swarms and trillions of connected sensors linking the physical and virtual worlds?

A person who made his fortune on information saw a lot of this coming. That was Mike Bloomberg, who — as he wrapped up his 12 years as mayor that began just after 9/11 with the NYPD creating a ring of steel and cameras downtown and around the city at the very dawn of this strange new world of infinite information — shrugged as he looked ahead to privacy as an engineering problem soon to be solved:

"You wait. In five years, the technology is getting better, there'll be cameras everyplace . . . whether you like it or not.

"You can't keep the tides from coming in," he said on his radio show in 2013.

We're getting there, with flying drones that recognize faces and cameras everywhere that remember what they've seen before, so that new recordings don't just go over old ones and we can rewind to see past events.

"It's just we're going into a different world, unchartered," Bloomberg went on. "We're going to have more visibility and less privacy. I don't see how you stop that. And it's not a question of whether I think it's good or bad. I just don't see how you could stop that because we're going to have them.

"The argument against using automation is just this craziness — that 'Oh, it's Big Brother.' Get used to it!"